a programmer's best friend :: Entries from May 2005

I just released the next alpha version of patForms, our form generation and validation package. This release contains some small bugfixes as well as a feature request from Helgi.
One of the coolest features of patForms is that you may embedd your form elements using XML tags directly in HTML files, like web controls in ASP.Net or Java Server Faces. patForms will then parse the HTML code and creates PHP objects from the embedded components that interact with the data the user submitted and automatically serializes them back at the end of the request. Other features are support for event-driven development and the subject/observer pattern to get rid of spaghetti code. Furthermore patForms provides custom filters and rules for the user input and is easily extendible.
Starting with this version, patForms is now also available through our PEAR channel, which makes the installation quite easy (if you have PEAR 1.4.0a11 or higher installed):
$ pear channel-discover pear.php-tools.net
$ pear install --alldeps pat/patForms
patForms also gets more and more acceptance in the community, currently there's work done on a patForms / Propel integration by Sven Fuchs and some other developers. This will allow you to build forms from Propel objects that automatically load and save data from and to the database. You can read more about these plans in the weblog of Sven. There's already some working code available and we expect a release of this quite soon.